The Winter Oak

by James A. Hetley

The hedge grew tall before them, dense and unbroken. It, too, reeked of magic and control. Khe'sha and the human followed it, around and around and around, and saw the same face everywhere.

  David finally stopped and scratched his head. "Maureen said there were gates. Little white wooden gates, just like an English garden. And a maze inside."

  {We come to attack, so there are no gates.}

  Khe'sha sniffed at the hedge, testing, amused at the thorns it presented and the way the section he approached was always denser and higher than the portions to each side. As if he needed to worry about thorns. Even his eyelids bore scales as hard as glass. But the smells . . .

  {Shen is inside. I think that I shall bite that witch, just a little nip, and let her live. Let the poison work on her, that she should die slowly over weeks. Slowly, and in pain.}

  The human backed away from him. "Your bite is poison?"

  {It is how our small ones hunt. They can attack prey larger than themselves, dangerous prey, bite once, and escape without risking injury. Then they wait. We are a very patient race, and can go long between meals.} The human had turned pale and smelled of fear-sweat once again.

  {No dragon would bite a Singer.}

  "Um. Thanks. I guess. I'd better keep some poems handy, just in case."

  {I smell poison in these thorns, as well. It is a sort that causes great pain to your kind. Beware what you touch.}

  The dark witch did not think of everything. Khe'sha closed his eyes and thrust his muzzle into the hedge, biting, shearing, twisting, as if he had prey bleeding life between his teeth. Thorns scratched across his scales and prickled inside his nose and across his tongue, but he ripped out a whole mouthful of bush and heaved it over his shoulder.

  Khe'sha opened his eyes and studied the hedge again, not surprised that it had filled the gap. David had retreated and stood staring at the clump of brush scattering dirt across the grass, at the dragon, at the hedge. If anything, he was paler than before.

  {We will find out how much Power the black witch buried around the roots of her hedge.}

  Then Khe'sha ripped out another mouthful, and another, and another, roaring his hatred, sprinkling the soil with droplets of dragon blood where the thorns scratched his nose and tongue and palate. The pale burn of the cuts and the poison just added fuel to his rage, and he gloried in the chance to match his strength against something, anything, after keeping his anger bottled for so long.

  When he looked again, the hedge stood lower and he could see the witch's cottage over the gap. Rustles to either side told him that more thornbush and briars moved to fill the gap, but each patch of dirt sprinkled with his blood stayed bare and free of the witch's power.

  He attacked once more, biting, biting, biting, clawing at the soil with both forepaws and driving forward with his strong hind legs, digging a furrow clean of roots and stumps and mixing the soil with his blood. The hedge screamed with pain, high and thin, at the edge of even a dragon's hearing, and he felt it weakening.

  And then it snapped. The hedge drew back, and bare soil met his nose. He opened his eyes again. A path waited, broad as a dragon's belly, straight through the hedge and into the grass surrounding a thatched cottage. He sniffed at the brush to either side and found no taint of the black witch. He'd broken her hold.

  He hoped that it had caused her pain.

  He smelled pain in the hedge, as well, but something other that was strange. He'd tasted something like it in one of the moose that he'd eaten, almost gratitude at finding an end to suffering. That moose hadn't tried to flee his death. He'd stood waiting on three legs, the fourth torn and bloody and smelling of human machines.

  Khe'sha flowed through the hedge and circled the cottage, sniffing. Yes, Shen was inside. Khe'sha smelled other things as well, magic and strange herbs and machines. He smelled traps and deceptions. The doors and windows were far too small for his bulk. He could tear off the roof, flatten the walls, but that might kill Shen. Going farther required more delicate tools than a dragon's fury.

  He turned back, finding the Singer just outside the gap in the hedge. {Come, my friend who was recently my enemy. This is why the forest wanted both of us.}

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The tree shook under Cáitlin, as if a sudden gust ruffled its leaves. There was no wind. She would have known, none better. Her branch shook again, and she grabbed the trunk to keep from falling. The winds still held their silence.

  Whatever shook her perch must be coming from below. She looked down, to meet the bored gaze of the black leopard looking up. It hadn't moved. Its branch hadn't moved, either. The cat yawned at her, glanced to the ground, and followed his glance in one flowing leap to land . . . catlike . . . on the leaves. He really was too large to move that smoothly.

  Her branch shook a third time, more violently, the leaves thrashing. It was the only part of the tree that moved. To make the message clearer still, the cat padded insolently to one side and settled into a lazy crouch, tail-tip flicking to one side and the other. Just the tip, about a hand-span's width, with the rest of the tail perfectly still. She'd always wondered how cats could do that.

  Something wanted her to climb down. It wasn't Fiona, because it was giving her a choice. Fiona would have just taken over her arms and legs and let the captive brain worry about clumsiness and falls.

  Well, the winds had said that Maureen worshipped trees. Apparently that regard was mutual. Cáitlin grimaced and stretched her aching body. She could take a hint.

  Her hips still hurt, deep in the bone where Fiona had molded them into the semblance of a man's. Cáitlin moved slowly, awkward, her balance strange and muscles uncertain, swinging down one branch, then another, then a third and a drop to the ground that sent daggers stabbing up her legs and through her pelvis to her spine and the base of her skull. She staggered, grabbed the tree trunk, shook her head to clear her eyes, and checked the leopard.

  He yawned again and licked his lips, showing fangs as long as daggers and gleaming nearly as bright. Not an encouraging landscape. He stretched fore and aft, kneading the dirt with huge paws. He strolled across the forest clearing, sniffed a bush here and a rock there, and then glanced back over his shoulder.

  {One could nip at you like a rude dog herding sheep. Or one could be polite and let you follow. Choose.}

  A cat with manners?

  Cáitlin sniffed the winds, finding nothing that linked back to Maureen. The cat and the tree acted on their own agenda. They wanted her to move. Strange . . .

  {One does not wish to wait all day.}

  Since when did cats have schedules? Cáitlin shrugged. Dougal had bred and bound strange animals. Add this new witch's seasoning to the stew, and the result was going to be . . . different. She wondered if she ought to pass a message on to the Pendragon's commander, ask her winds to tell Llewes of the change brought to the Summer Country. No. He'd abandoned her to her fate, the same Old One attitude towards a broken tool that you'd expect from Fiona. Let him find out on his own, the hard way.

  Cáitlin felt a kind of duality around her, as if two separate minds, two separate sets of eyes watched and balanced and guarded this forest. One smelled of the Old Blood and one . . . was something else, and older still. The Other linked tree and leopard.

  And the Old Blood seemed much more civilized.

  That was a hint. She followed the cat, staggering and limping at first but balance improving and muscles warming until she could almost walk like a normal person, listening to her winds. They brought her the earthy smells of the forest, leaf and flower and rotting humus, they brought her whiffs of the sharp maleness of the cat. They brought her the musk of a fox, a vixen but with something of the Other added to the mix.

  The winds also spoke of Fiona coming in rancid hate, they spoke of the surviving dragon and blood rage, they spoke of the red-haired witch hiding alone in the shadows of a stone tower. They spoke of ravens circling high in the thermals overhead and watching, impartial. Battle promised, and they remembered the
dead dragon. Whatever the outcome, they knew they would feed well.

  The black cat led her toward Maureen's keep. That seemed to match Fiona's wish, because Cáitlin passed her former limit and stepped into the wide meadow and saw gray stone against blue sky. The air lay still, heavy with wet grass and old burning and soaked ash, with a buzz of Power as a grace-note that tickled her nose.

  {One wishes you to proceed.}

  Cáitlin glanced back to where the leopard waited, a shadow under the shadows of the forest. A chill ran down her spine and back up again. She wondered if the cat was real, or a manifestation of the forest. Whichever it was, she was glad to put it behind her. That place frightened her, and few things could.

  Cáitlin turned and walked slowly toward the keep, open-handed and forcing her mind to stay calm. She wanted to make sure that the Power living there saw her and did not see a threat. A raven croaked from the direction of Fiona's cottage, and three others answered in sequence from the other corners of the sky. The call to dinner?

  Soft blackness smashed her from behind, and she fell into it.

  * * *

  Three cats herded Fergus through hallways and up stairs. He'd tried slipping through the spaces in the stones, invoking Dougal's ghost to frighten them, and found them waiting for him on the other side of the wall. Either they knew his tricks better than he did or they knew the ways of this castle very well. And ghosts seemed to hold no terrors for a cat. They sat and waited for him to emerge, slowly blinked green eyes, and stood up to stretch and return to herding him.

  Fergus leaned against a wall, asking it to remain solid and support him. He wiped sweat from his forehead and took a deep breath, trying to summon some of the keep's Power from the stone to cool the burning in his arm. His hand throbbed. The hallway fuzzed around him, sliding in and out of focus, and he knew that he was dying. Even Fiona knew. She'd quit ordering him around, knowing that he was a waste of time.

  The cats waited for him to catch his breath. Cats, or whatever they were.

  They seemed to be common housecats, an orange tom and two queens -- one tiger-striped in gray and the other a blotchy scattering of gray and white. And they hadn't threatened him, just made it clear that he should walk in one direction and not another. Step wrong, and the fur would bristle and the eyes narrow. A second step, and the ears went back and he could hear a low growl in the tom's throat.

  He knew enough about Power that he didn't try a third step wrong. He remembered these particular cats from Fiona's maze, and they had always been rather more than cats. Apparently they had changed allegiance.

  Or they'd been freed. The thought gave him pause.

  Many things held power in the Summer Country. Most of them were bound by greater powers. Fiona's maze was one, of course. Dougal's creatures, the dragons and the falcons and the hunting cat, even his forest. These three housecats, these things that appeared to be housecats. He couldn't sense a binding on them. If they were free . . .

  If they were free, and still acted for Maureen, the rules had changed. Even the Stone deep in the cellars of the tower felt as if it was free to follow its own ends. Hope mixed with its ancient pain and hatred, yet it urged him upwards rather than back to its dark roots. Fergus went where the keep wanted him to go.

  He shivered.

  {Move.}

  The tom's tail bushed out again, and he edged closer to Fergus. The two queens flanked him to right and left, leaving one direction open. No domestic cats would hunt that way, like a pride of lions cooperating to set a trap for wildebeest. Fergus shivered again. But did it matter? He was dying anyway.

  The tom took another step, and his ears flattened.

  "You don't need to shout."

  Fergus pushed himself upright, fighting through the fog and the roar in his ears. They wanted him to climb. Stone stairs spiraled up, uneven, random height and width and without a rail. He staggered, thrown off stride as the stair's makers had intended, one of many traps they'd set for trespassing assassins in the night.

  He caught himself on the rough wall and pushed off again and gained another three risers before he stopped to pant and force the stairs to stop moving under him. His heartbeat throbbed from fingertip to armpit and across his skin where the red tendrils of blood-poisoning spread.

  The cats waited. Fergus started to slide down the wall to sit and gain his breath. The tom hissed, his ears flat against his head and fangs gleaming between snarling lips. Fergus pushed against stone and staggered upright again.

  Three more steps. Pause, breathe, bring the stone walls back to stillness around his head. Ignore the sweat soaking his hair and back, trickling down his chest. Three more steps. Steps unnumbered, leading upward without end.

  A landing.

  A door stood in front of him. It was locked or barred. He turned. The cats crouched behind him, tails lashing. He heard the orange tom growl, even over the roaring in his ears. They wouldn't let him pass.

  Locked doors didn't matter. Not to a master of stone. He slid into the crystal structure that bound sand into stone, letting the coolness wash over him and ease his burning arm. A room opened around him, dark except for a thin shaft of light between leaves of a shuttered window, bare except for a shadow in one corner.

  His eyes adjusted to the darkness. The shadow formed into a woman, the redheaded witch. The witch waited for him, waited for the cats to fetch her enemy. She sat against one wall, held a glass of wine in one hand, studied him with mild curiosity. Curiosity, nothing more. The way he'd study an ant crawling across a piece of granite in his workshop.

  The scene pulsed around him, her face rushing toward him and then receding. He sighed with relief; she didn't draw and throw that knife this time, quick as lightning. She didn't seem to even carry it at her belt. She didn't expect danger. And she was right. He wasn't dangerous. Never would be dangerous again. He dropped to his knees, letting the wall become solid behind him.

  She shook her head and slid away from him to the far end of a tunnel. Words came echoing down the tunnel, slurred by his fading consciousness.

  "Who the hell are you?"

  * * *

  So both Cáitlin and Fergus were as good as dead. Fiona felt mild regret -- she would have preferred to get a little more service from her puppets. Now they both hung limp at the end of their strings, useless.

  She stood on the woods path, letting her Power seek out the Power around her, measuring its weakness and her strength. She would have preferred to let Cáit and Fergus walk through the minefields first. Circumstances hadn't allowed that. Fiona prided herself on being practical. She would be content with what she had.

  They'd told her much, her little puppets. Maureen had returned to the keep. That was wise. She had also returned to drinking, which was less wise. And she had burdened herself with a rabble of sick and wounded humans, helpless mouths to feed and a drain on the red witch's Power if she had any plans to heal and comfort them. Wise and unwise, both, because those bodies could stand between Maureen and her doom. Even humans could be dangerous, and ate Power in the killing.

  Least wise of all, Maureen had loosed the bonds Dougal had held. She didn't control the forest's power or the keep's. She didn't hold the reins and direct her defense, coordinating forces and strategy.

  Fiona smiled. The forest could have been formidable, a trap as strong as her own maze. And legend said that the dark keep held reserves that even Dougal hadn't known.

  Maureen had let both those Powers slip out of her hands. Foolish child. That would cost her.

  Fiona wrapped a cloak of awareness around her, testing the air and soil for danger. The land felt hostile, watchful, calculating. It knew her from past visits, and did not like her. She smiled again. As she had told the dragon, she was used to being hated. It made the world feel normal.

  She walked. The path snaked left and right like that dragon flowing through the woods, slipping between trees and around boulders, skirting patches of wetness, whiffs of swamp and rock and cinnamon fern. T
he watching pressed at her, but didn't attack.

  Good. Stunning the dragon twice had cost her dearly. She still needed to gather Power, drawing from the earth and the air and from the child within her. She rested one hand on her bulging belly, slowing time within her womb. The child quieted, and its heartbeat faded almost to stillness. Going into labor now would be so awkward.

  But she'd underestimated Maureen once before. Fiona would never make that mistake again. She had to reach the absolute peak of her Power before she struck.

  She could bear the child tomorrow, after this triumph. After binding attendants to her will. There'd likely be a wet-nurse among the refugees from that rebel keep. Fiona decided that she'd have to let some of the slaves live. Pass the burden along, then, let the baby drain Power from another.

  And if the dragon survived this day, she'd kill it then. It, and all the nestlings, saving only little Shen in her lab. They were too dangerous to live. Fiona shuddered, remembering how close those teeth had come, how drained she'd felt when that huge yellow eye had opened and come back into focus after the second stun-spell. She wouldn't have had the strength to run away.

  No, they were too dangerous to leave alive.

  She pulled her thoughts back to the trail. She'd walked Dougal's forest many times before, scouting, planning. She knew the flavor of the land, the twists of this path, the trees frowning on it, the stones and tangles flanking it. She should have reached the dragon bones by now.

  The trail sloped downward from her feet. It should rise, then dip to a stream, then rise again in the final climb to Dougal's keep high on its knob of rock. And only the single trail led between her cottage and the pasture oak and the keep. No branchings, no intersections.

  She sniffed the air -- wet leaves, soil, a faint sharpness of fox. Water hissed close ahead, water falling from high rocks rather than the gurgle of a forest stream.

  The trail had changed. She stood and felt for the sun and for the stars beyond the canopy of trees and behind the veil of daytime blue. The sky told her that her cottage lay off her left shoulder, not behind. The keep sat to her right, through a tangle of dark holly and hawthorn.